1994 - Basildon Peta By the time the young Basildon Peta was awarded MISA’s Press Freedom Award, he had already come up against the full might of the Zimbabwean police. The senior reporter at the Daily Gazette, Basildon was incarcerated in 1994 for a week, enduring long sessions of interrogation by the police, who failed to break his determination to stand by the truth. Basildon was also not cowered into silence and he went on to expose further incidents of corruption and abuse of power in government. 1995 - Fred M’membe Fred M’membe, probably one of the most persecuted journalists in his country and the rest of the region, is a qualified accountant who, along with colleagues John Mukela, Masautso Phiri and Mike Hall, founded The Post newspaper in Zambia in 1991. Since its founding as a weekly paper and its swift progress to a daily paper, The Post under the helm of Fred, tirelessly kept a watch on the government, exposing numerous incidents of corruption, illegal activities, bad governance, human rights abuses and lack of respect for the rule of law. In the process, and despite enormous efforts on the part of the government to harass The Post and Fred in particular, Fred has distinguished himself as a consistent and fearless journalist, committed to the ideals of media freedom. 1996 - Allister Sparks Allister Haddon Sparks has played a phenomenal role in the media in South Africa. Starting out as a reporter on the Queenstown Daily Representative in 1951, Allister rose to become a sub-editor under the renowned Donald Woods at the East London Daily Dispatch, the editor of the Sunday Express, and then the editor of the great Rand Daily Mail. It was during his tenure at the Rand Daily Mail in the late 1970’s that Allister distinguished himself as a journalist of great valour and strength, willing to stick his neck out for a story even though it might have reached into the deep echelons of government. In 1992, a decade after being dismissed from the Rand Daily Mail, Allister was instrumental in setting up the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism (IAJ), based in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the time of receiving the MISA Press Freedom Award, Allister was serving on the Board of the South African 1997 - Gwen Lister Gwen Lister, as editor of The Namibian, almost single-handedly kept up the mantle of press freedom in Namibia, both before and after independence. Starting out as a journalist at the Windhoek Advertiser in 1975, she eventually went on to establish The Namibian, which hit the streets for the first time in August 1985. From the outset, The Namibian was the only newspaper in Namibia that was brave enough to expose ongoing atrocities and human rights abuses being committed by the South African occupation forces. Gwen’s determination to uncover and report the truth never wavered, despite concerted attempts to harass and intimidate her and the rest of The Namibian staff. Gwen’s commitment to a free press remained steadfast after Namibia’s independence in 1990, and her paper continued to adopt a watchdog role, this time over the new government of the South West African People’s Organisation (Swapo). 1998 - African Eye News Service (AENS) African Eye News Service was the first media institution to be honoured with the MISA award. Based in the first South African province of Mpumalanga, AENS had established itself as one of the sub-region’s truly investigative news services. In its three years of existence, AENS, under the editorship of Justin Arenstein, had either halted or uncovered a series of corrupt practices in the public sector - some of which had led to public commissions of inquiry, or resignations of the affected officials. Its bold and extremely courageous reporting earned it several enemies in both the public and private sectors of the South African community. The agency attracted numerous multimillion rand defamation suits, and to date it had won every So This Is Democracy? 2005 -292- Media Institute of Southern Africa